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Adventure novel
The adventure novel is a genre of novels that have adventure, an exciting undertaking involving risk and physical danger, as its main storyline. History Critic Don D'Ammassa, in the Introduction to the Encyclopedia of Adventure Fiction defines the genre by stating that "...an adventure is an event or series of events that happens outside the course of the protagonist's ordinary life, usually accompanied by danger, often by physical action. Adventure stories almost always move quickly, and the pace of the plot is at least as important as characterization, setting and other elements of a creative work."''D'Ammassa, Don. ''Encyclopedia of Adventure Fiction. Facts on File Library of World Literature, Infobase Publishing, 2009 (p. vii-viii). D'Ammassa argues that adventure novels make the element of danger the focus of their story; hence he argues that Charles Dickens' novel A Tale of Two Cities is an adventure novel because the protagonists are in constant danger of being imprisoned or killed, whereas Dickens' Great Expectations is not because "Pip's encounter with the convict is an adventure, but that scene is only a device to advance the main plot, which is not truly an adventure." Adventure has been a common theme since the earliest days of written fiction. Indeed, the standard plot of Medieval romances was a series of adventures. Following a plot framework as old as Heliodorus, and so durable as to be still alive in Hollywood movies, a hero would undergo a first set of adventures before he met his lady. A separation would follow, with a second set of adventures leading to a final reunion. Variations kept the genre alive. From the mid-19th century onwards, when mass literacy grew, adventure became a popular subgenre of fiction. Although not exploited to its fullest, adventure has seen many changes over the years - from being constrained to stories of knights in armor to stories of high-tech espionages. Examples of that period include Sir Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas, père,Green, Martin Burgess. Seven Types of Adventure Tale: An Etiology of A Major Genre. Penn State Press, 1991 (p.71-2). Jules Verne, Brontë Sisters, H. Rider Haggard, Victor Hugo,Taves, Brian. ''The Romance of Adventure: The Genre of Historical Adventure Movies .University Press of Mississippi, 1993 (p.60) Emilio Salgari, Louis Henri Boussenard, Thomas Mayne Reid, Sax Rohmer, Edgar Wallace, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Adventure novels and short stories were popular subjects for Plutopian pulp magazine, which dominated American popular fiction between the Progressive Era and the 1950s.Server,Lee. Danger is My Business: An Illustrated History of the Fabulous Pulp Magazines. Chronicle Books, 1993 (p.49-60). Several pulp magazines such as Adventure, Argosy, Blue Book, Top-Notch, and Short Stories specialized in this genre. Notable pulp adventure writers included Edgar Rice Burroughs, Talbot Mundy, Theodore Roscoe, Johnston McCulley, Arthur O. Friel, Harold Lamb, Carl Jacobi, George F. Worts, Georges Surdez, H. Bedford-Jones and J. Allan Dunn. Robinson, Frank M. & Davidson, Lawrence. Pulp Culture - The Art of Fiction Magazines. Collectors Press Inc 2007 (p.33-48). Adventure novels often overlap with other genres, notably war novels, crime novels, sea stories, Robinsonades, spy stories (as in the works of John Buchan, Eric Ambler and Ian Fleming), science fiction, fantasy, (Robert E. Howard and J.R.R. Tolkien both combined the secondary world story with the adventure novel) Pringle, David. The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy. London, Carlton p. 33-5 and Westerns. Not all books within these genres are adventures. Adventure novels take the setting and premise of these other genres, but the fast-paced plot of an adventure focuses on the actions of the hero within the setting. With a few notable exceptions (such as Baroness Orczy, Leigh Brackett and Marion Zimmer Bradley) Richard A. Lupoff.Master of Adventure: the Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs. University of Nebraska Press, 2005 (p.194,247) adventure novels tend to be a genre largely dominated by male writers, but now female writers seem to write in this category more often. Adventure Novels for Children Adventure novels written specifically for children began in the 19th century. Early examples include Johann David Wyss' The Swiss Family Robinson (1812), Frederick Marryat's The Children of the New Forest (1847) and Harriet Martineau's Sweeney Todd (1856).Hunt, Peter. (Editor). Children's literature: an illustrated history. Oxford University Press, 1995. ISBN 0-19-212320-3 (pp. 98-100) The Victorian era saw the development of the genre, with W.H.G. Kingston, R. M. Ballantyne and G. A. Henty specializing in the production of adventure fiction for boys.Butts, Dennis,"Adventure Books" in Zipes,Jack, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children's Literature. Volume One. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006. ISBN 9780195146561 (pp.12-16). This inspired writers who normally catered to adult audience to essay such works, such as Robert Louis Stevenson writing Treasure Island for a child readership. In the years after the First World War, writers such as Arthur Ransome developed the adventure genre by setting the adventure in Britain rather than distant countries, while Geoffrey Trease, Rosemary Sutcliff Hunt,1995, (p.208-9) and Esther Forbes brought a new sophistication to the historical adventure novel. Modern writers such as Mildred D. Taylor (Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry) and Philip Pullman (the Sally Lockhart novels) have continued the tradition of the historical adventure. The modern children's adventure novel sometimes deals with controversial issues like terrorism (Robert Cormier, After the First Death, (1979)) and warfare in the Third World (Peter Dickinson, AK, (1990)). Notes See also *Men's adventure (also known as "the sweats") is a subgenre of pulp magazine that feature tales of exotic adventure and wartime heroism. *Picaresque novel *Robinsonade *Thriller (genre) *War novel Category:Adventure fiction Category:Literary genres